


Noise

by WahlBuilder



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Blood, Death, M/M, Void being a creepy place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 11:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11713683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: Oleg the High Overseer becomes the Outsider. Or a part of the Outsider. In any case, it involves being sacrificed.





	Noise

**Author's Note:**

> The Outsider/Corvo is mentioned.

Oleg pulls his knees to his chest. He supposes it’s an old response, to fear—an urge to make oneself smaller—and to distress—trying to find comfort in one’s body.

He knows no comfort. He knows nothing.

If he focuses on the details of his surroundings separately, they make sense. So he does, looking around, and makes a catalogue of these details. An orderly mind is clear and operates well.

  1. The chamber. More like a cave, really. A pool of slimy water by the wall, green and filled with bepincered things just visible under the surface. They don’t move.
  2. The ceiling. Or the half-lack of it, for it ends abruptly. It could be the floor in actuality, a caved-in floor. If you look at it for a long time, you will be sure it is the floor. The space beyond it—above? below?—is blue and filled with light, but it’s not the blue of the sky and it’s not the light of the sun.
  3. The marks. There are short, shallow parallel lines on the floor, the walls, the ceiling of the cave. Claw marks. Scratch marks.
  4. The lamp. It is a crude piece of iron with dusty glass that makes the light trapped inside of it look sickly-yellow. It is cylindrical, with a rusty handle. It is tipped, dangling at a perfect 45° angle. It will never fall.
  5. The flowers. Tiny purple things with crumpled petals, they are covering a path across the cave, like a welcoming path to a king.
  6. The— _Oleg pauses, trying to find the suitable descriptor_ —contraption. It sits beside the small pool—no, it is _poised_ , it is _waiting to pounce_ , pressing itself low to the floor. It looks like a whale cradle, one of those on the whaler ships and in slaughterhouses. The more Oleg studies it, the more it resembles that cradle. Only smaller. Just perfect to accommodate a different kind of victim.  
Oh no, he doesn’t not dare to look at the _thing_ in the cradle. The object. Just another detail of the surroundings. His gaze slides away as he tries to recover his mental discipline, but his gaze is drawn to it, and it takes a while for him to return to his list and now he cannot look away.
  7. The _object_. Pale, frozen in time. Skin like wax, unhealthy, and dark shadows under the eyes. The eyes are a terrible thing: half-lowered eyelids as if after a long sleep, and the eyes empty—but if one looks closely—and Oleg _does_ —one will see at the bottom of them the quiet horror of rousing wakefulness. The second terrible thing is the obscene gaping slit on the object’s throat, wet and red and glistening. Looking at it makes Oleg curls up tighter into himself—and his soaked shirt clings to his chest.



It’s drying already, the blood, cold and salty.

His hand moves to his own throat, and he half-expects the wound—not a mirror, but _exactly the same cut_ —to gape like cut fabric, opening the inner workings of his body. But his throat feels all right, if wet and with a slight, hair-thin line running across it.

He is staring at his own body—trying to accept that it is nothing but an object anymore.

Accept that his current surroundings—the strange light that is not the sun, the blue that is neither sky nor ocean, the hum and whaling that stitched his dreams together before this—that all this is him.

Or he is a part of all this.

The other one—the dark-eyed one—was vague about that.

When the Void shifts, admitting something that is bound to it, but not a part of it, Oleg feels it, aware of it like he could get aware of his breathing sometimes or the minute contractions of his muscles.

He is aware of Monroe’s steps and movement, too, as though Monroe is an ant marching—running—across his skin. So he doesn’t not turn when Monroe’s steps, silenced by the Void unlike Monroe’s heavy, shaking breathing, come near him. Only says, ‘It wasn’t painful.’

He realises Monroe is muttering something with every exhale. Oleg looks up, tearing his gaze away from his own corpse, frozen eternally at the moment of death. In the movement of Monroe’s lips he reads the quiet words.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…’ A litany that makes Oleg let out a laugh.

His laugh makes Monroe stop.

And Oleg starts laughing in earnest, like he never laughed before, until he falls sideways on the cold stone of the cave that is not real, until his whole body starts seizing in pain, until the wound on his throat gapes wetly and new blood—thick, white-blue and glowing—drips down on the rock.

And he only stops when he realises the Void is laughing with him, juddering under him so much that Monroe—upside down when Oleg gazes at him—has to grab a lamp post that sprouted out of nowhere.

‘Stop!’

Monroe sounds frantic, panicked. Oleg has never heard him like this. And he stops.

Then turns onto his belly in the pool of his glowing blood, gets to his hands and knees, then up, up. Looks down at himself. The shirt is thoroughly ruined. ‘At least they took off my coat. Red blood wouldn’t be noticed, but glowing white stains would raise questions.’

‘Would you _please_ stop?’

Oleg glances at Monroe, his wide dark eyes, his ashen face. Like a faded portrait. His right hand clutching a sword, his left throbbing with the Mark etched onto it.

Oleg licks his lips. ‘I will give you my own. My own Mark. He said I could do it. Anything he could do, I can do it. Anything I can imagine…’ They spoke for several eternities. He wanted to know everything.

‘What are you talking about?’ Monroe’s voice returns him to this particular spot in the Void. It’s so difficult to focus on just one point of un-space and un-time.

‘I am this,” Oleg opens his arms wide. ‘Like him. Like this. The Void.’ He smiles. Almost thirty years of being convinced that the Outsider is… not evil, but to be careful about. Their meeting only confirmed that.

And now, Oleg is… that. This. Him. Or something else, he’s not sure. ‘He left. He was eager, you see. Said something about wanting a vacation, spending time with his favourite. _The Royal Protector needs fresh air and sun_.’ It comes out not in his voice, but in the voice of _the other_.

Oleg can feel warmth of the sun on his skin—on the skin of the other.

A touch brings him back to Monroe. Being grabbed by the shoulders does that to a person. ‘You were _killed_!’

Monroe looks unwell. His eyes are too wet, his grip is too crushing.

Oleg is calm. Does it comes with being killed? ‘So I was. It changes little. I need to go back to Holger Square. My brothers must be worried about my disappearance.’ Monroe opens his mouth, but Oleg can’t have that right now.

He touches Monroe’s cheek, the stubble prickling his fingers and the skin wet. Not from the river or the sea or the ocean. ‘Are you scared?’

One of Monroe’s hands releases his shoulder and grabs his palm instead, and a wet kiss is pressed to it. ‘You are mad. This is madness.’

Oleg smiles. ‘So, like the usual.’ He sees all possibilities—not in the stars, but in the fabric of the world itself. Monroe’s questions. Monroe’s accusations. Monroe’s rage and his panic and his fear and grief, howling and vengeful. Oleg considers his own words and how they would impact the outcome.

It’s not so different from his everyday job. That’s strangely disappointing. ‘They hoped it would earn them favour. Not that I would be taken in and made a vessel. Not that I would come back with you. I see how you murder them. Or has it already happened?’

Monroe’s eyes open for a brief moment, then close again against his palm. ‘Partially. Nobody touches my husband.’

‘They will pay. I won’t take it from you.’ He takes Monroe’s other hand, so grounding and real. ‘You handled being married to the High Overseer. Now we’ll see how you shall handle being married to the Outsider. Or a half of him.’

Monroe kisses his palm again and rolls his eyes. ‘I’ve been doing fine these years, honey.’

Oleg is not surprised at his fast recovery. He pulls at his hand. ‘Let’s go kill some heretics, then. Being dead is not an excuse.’

**Author's Note:**

> Other adventures of Monroe the Whaler and Oleg the Overseer can be found in [The City and the beasts](https://archiveofourown.org/series/450460) series.


End file.
